open source marketer and community manager

Month: May 2015

Last week I have received the new Dell XPS 13 from the Sputnik program, the one with Ubuntu pre-installed. I wanted to vote with my wallet since I believe Ubuntu is a pretty solid desktop environment, on par with Mac OS X and various Windows.

Design-wise Dell has produced a very good looking machine, nothing to say about that. Kudos to Dell’s team on designing something much prettier than a Macbook Air. The screen with no border is fantastic with almost no frame and it’s great to look at it.

The only complaint I have towards Dell are the options they picked for the Sputnix program: the only way not to get a touchscreen is to buy a severely limited machine with only 128MB disk. No way. All the other options force you to spend money and sacrifice battery power on a useless feature.

I think touchscreens are uncomfortable to use on desktops and I said so a long time ago. Unless the desktop OS is radically re-designed for touch and hand gestures on the monitor, it makes no sense. I would have never bought the touchscreen if Dell had offered a 256MB option with the regular monitor.

On the Ubuntu side there are quite a few glitches like this issue with the cursor becoming sticky on some applications even if the touch-to-click on the touchpad is disabled and some difficulty to adapt to the ultradense display. By the way, that’s another reason not to get the touchscreen: lower resolution is good enough on such a small laptop anyway. Installing Ubuntu Vivid also was a bit more painful than I thought.

All in all, I didn’t return the laptop as I thought I would, mainly because I needed to upgrade to a machine with 8GB rapidly.